Below is the full top 25 list we have voted for. It’s a pretty good list that I believe adequately represents the sentiment on both /r/androidgaming and /r/android. I’ve also created a full video presenting this list with some descriptions and praises, as well as some Redditor quotes, for each of these games which I’ve linked below.

A number of devs/PR reps/community managers etc are going to be popping in over time to give a wave here in this post. Let me start by giving a big thanks to all those that helped nominate and vote these games up, and to all the devs that made such excellent games. I learned a few lessons in gathering all this data and hope to do it again in the future over subcategories etc with a few tweaks based on those lessons. Without further adieu…..

I’m on my way out of town in a couple days, but I promise I’ll release the full data set for those interested (we even have country data for part of it) and for transparency. In the future, any list I aggregate with have the transparency released the same day.

I’d definitely buy a device like this as it’s how I’ve generally managed my PC upgrades for the past decade: buy a great case and fill it with awesome parts that’ll last me a couple years, then rip out parts and replace with better fillings as needed. I think this product would be immensely popular as customers could have mix and match to fit their exact customization needs (bigger camera, bigger storage, bigger battery, etc.). And, honestly, outside of case color, customization in mobile handsets isn’t really an option. Heck, with the iPhone, you get what you get and that’s it outside of choosing how much RAM you want.

At some point, smartphone ownership can start to feel like a runaround. You buy the phone with the new! best! features! and a year later,Apple (or whoever) reveals a newer phone with the newer! bester! features! and your phone becomes obsolete. Enter Phonebloks, a brilliant modular concept phone.

The concept, from designer Dave Hakkens, is of a totally modular phone with separate “parts” that can be swapped out, removed, or upgraded, depending on the needs of the user. When they make a faster chip or a better screen, you could simply buy a new chip or screen without replacing the entire phone. If you just want a lot of disk space or battery juice and don’t care about your camera, you could sacrifice the one for the other. Smart!

And sure, it may be unrealistic. It doesn’t seem to be designed with profitability in mind, which would make it a tough sell for cell phone manufacturers. And I have no idea if it would even be possible to engineer something like this. (Though if they can put a freakin’ fingerprint scanner on an iPhone, surely someone could make something like this work?)

But whatever, this idea is too appealing to ignore completely. Why not explore it? See what happens? You don’t have to give them money to support the idea; all they ask is that people go to Thunderclap and lend them some social media push. And what’s the harm, really? Phonebloks may never amount to anything, but you never know.

Indie games have long had cult followings so it’s no surprise that Gamasutra found an Indie-heavy presence at Gamescom. Read on to find out what the five biggest takeaways were for them at Gamescom.

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The GDC Europe conference is over for another year (Gamasutra’s full coverage here), and as partner event Gamescom begins to wind down on the press front, I’ve been collating the various tidbits that I’ve taken away from this week.

There was already plenty to think about with regards to the various talks that were given over the last several days, but numerous conversations I had with developers, publishers et al also cemented a number of key points that appeared to brim to the surface on multiple occasions.

Here’s the five main talking points that I seemingly couldn’t escape from throughout the week.

1. Mobile is a massive market, but it’s not the be all and end all

There were, of course, hundreds of developers all eager to show off their mobile games during the show, and a good portion of the talks at GDC Europe centred around the mobile market.

But there was also notable unrest. Many developers I talked to, some who had dabbled in mobile and others who had not, were quite frankly feeling a little sick and tired of the sentiment that if you’re not making a game for mobile platforms, you face being irrelevant.

The team behind Nintendo 3DS game SteamWorld Dig, for example, had previously released a mobile game — and while it provided decent enough sales, the studio wasn’t really all that happy to eventually have its game lost to the destructive tide of mobile games that land on the iOS App Store every day.

The 3DS eShop has been a different story entirely for the Image and Form team. While there clearly aren’t as many potential consumers to hook, the fact that the team’s game was one of only a handful of titles that was made available during its launch week meant that visibility was high, and a feature on the front page of the eShop meant even more sales.

I heard a similar sentiment from plenty of other developers too, including Shadow of the Damneddirector Massimo Guarini. The industry veteran (who founded the studio Ovosonico) revealed his PS Vita game Murasaki Baby earlier this week, and he too doesn’t see the appeal of launching a game onto an online store where he’ll be battling against hundreds and thousands of other titles to rise to the top for a brief space of time.

Massimo Guarini’s Murasaki BabyThis isn’t anything new, of course — just last month Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell noted that “the middle ground devs all ran off to mobile, and left the door unlocked for us.” He too announced a Sony partnership this week, as his upcoming game Volume will debut on PS4 and PS Vita.

But whereas these sorts of musings have been going on for a while, I really got the impression this week that, for many more developers, there’s acknowledgement that mobile isn’t the answer to everything.

2. The confusing indie console message

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that console manufacturers absolutely adore indie devs all of a sudden.

Jump back just a year ago, and The Big Three were touting their massive AAA releases on a regular basis. Throughout this week, there’s a notable indie movement, as there has been throughout 2013: Sony’s conference was packed full of indie games, Microsoft revealed its ID@Xbox self-publishing program, and Nintendo was bigging up a number of its indie games on Nintendo 3DS, including the aforementioned SteamWorld Dig.

But while it all sounds fantastic on the surface, I came away from this week rather confused about whether it’s all for show, or whether these console giants are truly positioning indie games as a main selling point.

Take the contrast between Sony’s conference and its Gamescom show floor display, for example. I’d set out to play as many of the indie games coming to Sony consoles as possible, but when I arrived at the massive Sony booth, it was rather difficult to actually find the indie games.

That’s because while the triple-A releases had each been granted massive space with a handful of monitors each, the indie games had been relegated to the edges and corners of the booth, with barely any signposting at all.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Sony should have thrown OlliOlli, Spelunky or Metrico stands up right next to the potentially millions-selling triple-A PS3 and PS4 games that Sony has on the cards — I’d personally love if they’d have done so, but I’m not naive enough to expect that would have been the case.

But when I say that the indie games appeared to be a complete afterthought of the booth, I’m not exaggerating. You had to essentially skim around the outskirts of the Sony booth, away from all the main games, and then peer down at the scattered Vitas to actually find the games you wanted to play.

Multiple times I had to choose a landmark somewhere else in the room — “Let’s meet just next to the massive The Last of Us booth, then we can walk to my game from there” — because it was so difficult to find any individual indie games. Numerous of the devs that I talked to weren’t very happy about it either.

To be fair, at least I could find some indie games at the Sony booth. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place, but I didn’t see a single indie game at either the massive Nintendo or Microsoft areas. Again, I stress that I wasn’t hugely surprised by this at all, but it does seem to clash somewhat with the indie pushes that appear to be happening online and during conferences.

From my perspective, it’s clear that these companies are well aware that indie games aren’t going to sell consoles to a certain segment of players, hence why the triple-A showing is still very much front and center. Still, it’s discouraging to see one message being pushing in one area, and then seeing an entirely different message in another.

3. Exciting and quirky new hardware still brings in the masses

People are always happy to queue up or stand around to see something a bit different, and this year was no different.

The lines to experience the Oculus Rift VR headset were lengthy, and I had plenty of conversations about how the new HD visuals looked and felt, and what could potentially be done with the technology.

I hadn’t tried the standard version of the Oculus Rift, but pretty much everyone I talked to who had sampled both the standard and HD versions said that there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the two. Still, it’s early days for the hardware, and no doubt numerous months before it will be made available to the public.

But it wasn’t just the Rift that was pulling in the crowds. Mikolaj Kaminski’s Achtung Arcade, an arcade machine packed full of smaller games from the dev, sat quietly in a corner until someone decided to pick up a controller — at which point a crowd would gather to see what all the fuss was about.

And the Luggatron was particularly exciting. Joon Van Hove from Glitchnap, who has previously created arcade-style machines in the most wackiest of places (for example, integrated into a baby carriage) wanted to bring another of his crazy machines to GDC Europe, but could only check one bag in.

It’s remarkable to see this sort of innovation with your own eyes, and it’s no wonder that so many of these smaller indie shows like Wild Rumpus and Bit of Alright are growing so rapidly in popularity, when they have great ideas like these to enjoy.

4. Being an indie console launch title is not the same as being a AAA launch title

Whenever a new Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo console launch rolls around, we regularly hear the same studio names — Ubisoft, for example, are massive fans of early console adoptions, and always make sure to have at least a handful of titles ready for launch.

It’s obvious why, of course: Gamers want to pick up a small number of games with their new consoles, sometimes regardless of quality, and so having a wide spread of titles at launch that perhaps don’t incur as large production costs as normal can be very beneficial. Of course, your relationship with the manufacturer won’t exactly be harmed either.

And there’s the added bonus that the press wants to talk about each and every console launch game. If you’re launching alongside a games console, you are going to get articles all over the shop.

As it turns out, however, it may be the case that smaller indie games delivered at launch don’t see such benefits. As part of a talk earlier this year, Felix Bohatsch from Broken Rules revealed that his game Chasing Aurorahad not received any sort of sales spike at the Wii U launch whatsoever.

I’m not going to pretend that Chasing Aurora was fantastic and essential — even Bohatsch himself admitted that the game needed more time, and it was rushed for release at launch — but the fact that the studio saw zero sales spike at launch, while triple-A companies churn out some awful stuff for console launches and still see enough of a spike to make it worthwhile, should really tell us something.

Bohatsch’s reasoning was that it was a combination of players picking up a handful of triple-A games and being satisfied enough with that, and a slightly high price point for the amount of content Broken Rules was offering. From my point of view, it does seem to make sense that more traditional players are going to be focusing on the likes of New Super Mario Bros. U and Nintendo Land instead of heading to the new eShop and plucking out games at random.

In fact, Bohatsch suggested that if he could go back and do it again, he’d instead launch a few months after the Wii U came out, in a bid to catch those people who had finished off all the triple-A titles, and were now hungry for me. It’s an angle well worth considering for any developers who are currently crunching hard to be ready for the upcoming Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launches.

5. The emotional game uprising

Although I don’t like to admit it, I regularly shed a tear or five when watching tear-jerker movies and TV shows. In contrast, I cried for the first time ever at a video game last year — the glorious The Walking Dead.

Stirring up emotion in players has never really been at the forefront of game design — well, unless you’re David Cage, of course — but the last year has definitely seen a surge of developers talking about injecting emotion and personality into their characters.

Take the recent Brothers, for example, which managed to stir up emotion in players simply through gameplay, rather than any real storyline. Telltale and Starbreeze aren’t the only studios exploring emotion either, as plenty of conversations I had this week involved making the player feel something for the characters and their tales.

But there were plenty of developers talking about emotional responses to non-film-like games too. Gone Home was mentioned numerous titles, for example, while the aforementioned Massimo Guarini is currently building an entire game around emotion, as players take his Murasaki Baby by the hand and guide her through fear and elation.

There’s still a long way to go, no doubt, until we can truly claim that video games stir up the range of emotions that other mediums have been mustering up for years. But the overall impression I got this week is that plenty of steps are being taken in the right direction.

Being employed in the telecom industry since 2000, it’s great to see practical, helpful, possibly life-saving applications available for use on smartphones. As NextGen E911 is being deployed nationally, albeit slowly in many cases, expect to see texting, picture messaging, and more diagnostic uses for smartphones in emergencies.

Would you feel calm and collected enough during an emergency to start up an app and try to use it to save someone’s life?

911 App Uses Smartphones to Virtually Place Dispatchers at the Scene of Emergencies

A team of researchers has developed a mobile medical application that harnesses smartphones to virtually place 911 dispatchers at the scene of emergency situations.

The app, developed by a team led by University of North Texas engineering professor Ram Dantu with support from the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, enables 911 dispatchers to remotely control the smartphone of a 911 caller at the scene, enabling the dispatcher to see video of the scene and collect vital information about the victim.

During emergency calls, 911 dispatchers ask callers basic questions to help them assess the situation, but callers don’t always know the answers.

“When a 911 operator asks the question, ‘Is the patient breathing?’ callers often have no idea,” Dantu said during a virtual press conference today.

A smartphone placed on a victim’s torso allows the emergency operator to view the victim’s breaths per minute. This allows the operator to gauge whether the caller should start CPR. Photo credit: Logan Widick, University of North Texas

The app his team created is intended to solve that problem. Using the software, a caller at the scene can place a smartphone on the victim’s chest to monitor their breathing rate and place the victim’s finger on the smartphone’s camera to check their heart rate. The app can also cufflessly monitor the victim’s blood pressure. All information captured is transmitted wirelessly to 911 dispatchers.

At the press conference, the research team also demonstrated the app’s CPR assistance feature. A 911 caller at the scene can strap a smartphone to their hands using a piece of clothing or a plastic bag, for example, to get instruction on how to perform CPR. The app can also provide real-time feedback—urging the caller to increase the speed or depth of compressions, for example.

The app also features text-to-speech technology, which can help in situations where a 911 caller doesn’t speak English or is hearing or speech impaired.

Henning Schultzrinne, of the Federal Communication Commission, said the app is one example of technology that can interface with the new Next Generation 911 systems being rolled out across the country. These IP-based systems replace the voice-only 911 systems used in the past and can incorporate new sources of information, such as text messages, images, video, and data.

The app has been tested by 40–50 individuals in a lab setting, and the researchers hope to launch a pilot in a hospital or nursing home environment soon, Dantu said. He said the app will require FDA approval, and the team’s next steps include talking with vendors of emergency dispatch protocols to learn how to integrate the app with their systems. It was initially developed for the Android platform, but the researchers also plan to launch a version that can run on Apple’s iOS. They hope to have a version of the app available for download in 2–3 months.

Clipless is about 72% of the way toward its $25,000 Kickstarter goal. This is an innovative, interesting “iPhone” device (can be used with any phone, any tablet, and I’m sure plenty of other gadgets). You attach a sticky-backed clip to the back of your device and it’s held in place via magnets on to walls, through clothes, etc. Genius!

Their Kickstarter run expires in less than a month. Head to their Kickstarter page to help support this project and preorder your Clipless for a starting donation of just $1.

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A company known as They Innovate has designed Clipless, a mounting device that fastens a smartphone to almost any place imaginable. A wall, clothes, car dashboards, and essentially anything with a moderately flat surface will work, according to the creators.

The purpose of Clipless is to do away with leather pouches. This product allows users to wear their phones as they would a pouch, but it uses a discreet disc and clip that attaches a phone to the wearer’s clothes.

Clipless consists of three pieces. The first is a connector stuck with semi-permanent adhesive to the back of your phone. This attaches to the second piece, the actual Clipless which attaches to the outside of your clothes by slotting into a disc, the third component, worn inside the fabric.

The adhesive is only good for one use, so to use a different phone, extra connectors would be necessary. Clipless can also be attached to other flat surfaces through a separate mount. The goal is for users to be able to use Clipless whether carrying their phones or mounting them to static locations.

The creators are adding NFC capability to the device. This opens up all kinds of options, such as launching a specific app when mounting at a certain location (e.g. a recipe app when mounting on the kitchen refrigerator).

They Innovate is seeking funding for its Clipless device on Kickstarter. At the time of writing, there are plenty of early bird backer offers left. These provide one Clipless, one connector, one clothing disc, and one NFC mount for US$17. Once those run out, the company is offering Clipless for $35.

Apparently Google believes it can entice me to download and play more mobile games by taunting me with what’s currently popular in Japan. How dare they use my love of anime against me. (Damnable data mining!)

Are you curious about what’s super hot in Japan right now? Then follow the link below.